The Connected Digital Economy special interest group – a collaboration between the Technology Strategy Board and three Knowledge Transfer Networks – will be the main forum for engagement and discussions with businesses and academics and other stakeholders interested in the establishment of the Connected Digital Economy catapult.

CDEC will be a Company Limited by Guarantee – that’s the plan at the moment. But this will be separate from the activity model.

Multi-disciplinary nature of the CDEC asks one questioner – how will you maintain the balance between various stakeholders. Nick says that they are actively looking at this ‘live topic’. It’s going to be difficult to balance all the interests.

Jeremy Silver says that want to create a ‘free-er space’ where edgier things can happen.

Looking at relationships between Universities and SMEs – why is there no meeting around that?

How do we ensure that we have learning and gathering of the learning from the CDEC activities and projects.

Nick says they are starting with the Strategic Partners – they had so much interest that they had to ‘partition’ the discussions so they went for big organisations first and also “where we can have more bilateral discussions”.

Discussion of the importance of security and how it cuts across all the three topics areas – but in different ways. CDEC with some sort of security test bed or infrastructure project that could explore some of the security issues.

Another questioner says that there are lots of projects and test beds in Europe and N America – how about linking up with the European projects in this area?

Maurizio says that if you want to go that way “you might as well shut down the TSB”. He doesn’t see that the two are mutually exclusive. We meed to make sure we benefit “UK-based businesses”.

Questioner says that we need to get IT SMEs involved – 96% of them have fewer than 20 people and they deliver fro the economy. How can we do that? How about getting it into one Tweet. Nick says “Get into the market before it exists”.

Jeremy says, somewhat harshly he admits, that this CDEC is not going to work for everybody and there may not be SMEs that can become involved. They do want to get SMEs involved and agree that it’s important to look at the mechanisms for involving SMEs fully in the process.

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RT @andrewbud: #cdecatapult – the question of testbeds has arisen. TSB note no one is using European test-beds – so should the UK repeat the approach?

Serious discussion now about the culture and stance of the CDEC and how it needs to approach its task. Someone points out that the results on the spreadsheet may not capture the attributes of successful companies in the sector. There’s a bit of a debate about what the culture and stance of the CDEC should be to encourage speed and agility and to not be bureaucratic. Seems to be broad consensus that while the attributes and capabilities may be necessary but not sufficient (if you see what I mean).

Feedback session

Graham – we did the evaluation and we also discussed the ethos, culture and approach needed by the CDEC. In this sector, he also points out that the innovation often comes from an approach to openness and play; and the group were a bit concerned about the risk of an overly bureaucratic approach.

Ian – global e-commerce and health informatics came out as very high in the scoring of opportunities. The development of new businesses, help with PR and publications (out in the real world) and more help with the market opportunities as capabilities. Need to be engaged in the local community also. Security testbed and network testbed were Lso seen as important

Steve – similarity of outputs is very interesting he says.

Here are some of the thoughts of participants via Twitter after the event: